Fighting my way back to fabulous…and beyond

12May

I would like to introduce a term I call “crispy”. This is what I term the experience of getting older and neglecting the body or really just letting life come in and make us forget the magical connection we have to our bodies and thereby losing limberness and flexibility. It’s the experience of hearing things go snap-crackle-pop when we reach over to touch our toes or, for those of us who do, raise our leg to put it up on the ballet barre. These are just a couple of the ways I recognized I was becoming “crispy”. And folks let me tell you, if at any point in your life you were used to going down into full splits or kicking your leg high in the air or even bending all the way over and easily touching your toes , it is a very jarring experience to wake up and realize you can’t do these things with the same ease or at all.

But the good news is now you are awake. And you have decided whatever it was in your life that made you neglect your star player – that brilliant person staring back at you in the mirror – you are not going to let it come between you and your fabulousness ever again. I am here to tell you that “crispiness” can be reversed and you can fight your way back to fabulous. I am in the process of doing this, working on it little by little everyday, and I am absolutely flabbergasted and amazed at how the body can be retrained to stretch and bend even after years of neglect. It is truly an awe-inspiring thing to witness and experience.

As much as it feels like it, we did not get this way overnight. This is good news because it means that the way we slowly ate, drank, stressed, cried, screamed, bored ourselves into rigidness, we can actually gradually breathe, love, yoga, zumba, pilates (you get the idea…) our way out. With each day that I feel myself getting stronger, my stamina increasing, my balance improving, my knees whining less, my cellulite disappearing (keeping it all the way real y’all), I realize not only will I become fabulous again, but I just might get into the best shape of my life.